THE GIFT

 

It is not wrong to say real gifts are not just people, 

or the places, their presence, how they make you feel, but also things.

Everything you received, even the ones you find under your table cloth;

a chocolate wrapper from the college canteen on the last day,

a handmade birthday card gifted by your best friend from fourth grade,

the tickets of your first movie date, which is now a soft faded piece of paper.

You stick it on the teal journal your friend gifted on your birthday,

which you had put down after checking the price a few months back.

Noting the name of the movie because what if age starts to act not just like a number

letting that memory fade to oblivion.

Treasure it or not, things too let you go back in time

telling stories that no person could ever tell you.

Sometimes they are just things of the past,

reminding you of the child you were.

Like the red coloured Tom and Jerry tin pencil box I had in kindergarten,

lined with the stickers of wrestlers, cartoons, and faces; known and unknown,

which I saved from the Tiffany wafer packets my aunt brought on her annual visits

from a land, I still call “gulf”.

Or the book, ‘1000 Words to Talk About’ which taught me the words

and the story I imagined of a family that used those words.

Books after books, cards, letters, Amazon orders,

surprises, and happiness delivered straight to your doorstep.

All those things that still amuse you without any pixie dust,

everything that unspools a yarn of memory suddenly becomes precious.

Like the appoopanthadi I now collect,

chased on Sunday mornings on our way to church.

Our fingers hurt as we pulled it from among the touch-me-nots.

We let it fly after holding it like a soft dream in our hands.

It floats, not as swift as the Stumper balls we used to play cricket with,

but light as the memories of many summers we played through.

The strange calmness of letting go or the euphoria of holding on is a choice;

for people, places, and things.